


They're Not Like Us

by asmodeusyne



Category: Himalaya
Genre: F/M, original - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 01:30:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15108974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asmodeusyne/pseuds/asmodeusyne
Summary: I don't know if this counts as fanfiction, except to say that it's AU prose fiction based off my own in progress 8-part miniseries. The scripts for each episode are written up to at least Episode 8, Draft 1.Let's just start out by saying that never, in a million years, at the end of all time, humanity and hope, would Rachel ever deign to give Sergei his way. He'd probably kill her just to punish her for making him feel emotion.Rachel is the apex hero of the story, a young genius with a slightly infantile attitude problem and no real status or occupation in the post-apocalypse world of Himalaya, the largest and least radiated of the world's remaining continents.Sergei begins as the son of a security officer at the Kori Crown Dam diggings. He ends as the sadistic murdering leader of a growing paramilitary force referred to as the Lammergeiers by the people they torment in the squalid, slummy Cradle down the mountain.This just as a point of background. This is just straight hate fucking, really. There isn't actual non-con, but Sergei is every kind of monster, so treat that as a disclaimer.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how many chapters I'll be adding to this. This is a doodle purely to amuse myself, so if it amuses you too, great. If you're interested in seeing the original content, let me know and I will arrange it.
> 
> As a departure from the normal disclaimer...this all belongs to me! When, inshallah, some amazing person finally gives me a shot in the writers room and I'm able to eventually produce my own work, you have all the permission in the world to write nasty fanfiction based on it. But until that time, all characters, all scripts, all content, all concepts, these are my things, and if they appear in some other context, and it gets back to me, that will be a problem for you. This, as with all my original writing, is my life's work, and the courts do not look kindly on intellectual property theft. Hence why I will be keeping track of folks who are reading it. 
> 
> That said, enjoy! Comment! If you end up reading the source material, comment on that also, that's why I make it public.

“Come away. It’s done.”

Rachel didn’t move. She crouched, frozen, blood covering her hands, the last of it pulsing gently out of Hudson’s rent throat. The eyes that looked out at her from under long lashes were already dull, the warmth of human expression and intelligence already fleeting. With it, Rachel sensed, her own future, her own chance at happiness or...what, love?

She felt the shadow stalking at her back. Suddenly, her brain began to click ahead, to fall in its normal efficiency. She looked at Hudson, Hudson’s remains, Hudson’s corpse, Hudson’s absent flesh. She imagined it through all the stages of decomposition, marbling, bloating, flies picking away at greasy bones. None of these things would happen, of course. The Griffon vultures and the Lammergeiers would redistribute Hudson’s carbon leftovers. Where his consciousness went hardly mattered.

Rachel was shaken out of her reverie as Sergei’s strong hand jerked her roughly to her feet. She turned, slapped it away as she’d slapped him away countless times, the way she would a buzzing insect. Only he was closer to her, and his face was in terribly clear focus. And he did not let go of her wrist.

She wanted to tell him to go away, to go to hell, to leave her alone to try and find her grief under her biological understanding, but the look on his face stopped her cold. He had looked at her with smirking irony, thinly veiled malice, and licentious, obscene exaggeration, but never before had he made her feel the full force of his blank, mindless hunger. His dark blue eyes were empty of any articulate human emotion, but unlike the eyes of the dead man, they saw her. His lips were parted, and he breathed soundlessly through his mouth, as though he wanted to draw the taste of her from the air.

He tilted his head, and his white blonde bangs, now blood stained, slid over his forehead. As he stared at her like a leopard watching from the grass, she remembered that the bloody scalpel she’d used to spare Hudson from this man’s pleasure was still, as of this moment, clutched in her fist.

The instant she tensed, he sensed it, and before she even thought to act, he snatched it out of her hand, and threw it away, then seized that wrist as well. She struggled halfheartedly, knowing that he could physically overpower her on his worst day. He dragged her around the other side of the ten-foot-high altar, so that the ancient Buddha’s back was to them.

His mouth curled into a smile, and suddenly the essence of him, whatever animated him and gave him the aspect of a person with a range of emotion and desires, fell down over the void like a curtain. He held her wrists tightly, in anticipation of her resistance, but she didn’t bother. If he was going to act, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. And seeing that, he seemed disappointed. He let go of her, and looked down at her, somewhat puzzled as to how to proceed.

“Well?” she asked, wanting to needle him, but she knew it was no good. He was going to take something from her. Maybe her life. Maybe her long, irrelevant virginity. Knowing that didn’t give her confidence, but it did give her certainty, and some measure of calm. She had never really considered his professed attraction for her as any serious enterprise of his- she was his intellectual and social superior, and he couched his resentment in flirtation, that was all.

Only the way he was looking at her now, hungry, but wary, as though to further this moment would leave him in some way vulnerable, she suddenly realized that this man, this psychopath, this warlord and terrorist, this sadistic killer, rapist, patricide and possessor of sundry other hateful distinctions, felt something for her. More than that. Rachel understood, irrevocably, that he woke in the depths of his rare hours of sleep choking with the pain of his need for her. She tormented his dreams. She lived under his skin.

She stared at him, and her body betrayed her anxiety as she crossed her arms around herself. He watched her back, now standing straight. The right sleeve of his commando sweater was soaked up to the elbow in blood, the result of gutting the person whose remains were now cooling on the other side of the altar. Hudson. She could not make sense of the context of his living, laughing, gentle and enigmatic presence, and the body was no token. He was gone. It was, as Sergei had said, done.

Sergei was the only thing that made sense to her, in this moment. She could read him, could understand at least the living physicality of him. She took him in whole. Six feet one inch, two hundred pounds of graceful muscle. He’d done most of his schooling at a delinquent boot camp school in Siberia, and the physical demands had affected his growing body, and had given him a liquid grace that made him look as though he trained at the Bolshoi when he wasn’t doing knuckle pushups on concrete.

His fine Slavic features fell into a relaxed curiosity, watching her sudden, introspective evaluation of him. This was new for him too, intimate and intense. In fifteen years of regretfully knowing him, she had only ever given him the privilege of her full gaze a handful of times. Whenever she had seen him, it was in the tail of her eye, in the act of turning her face away from him, ignoring him, rejecting him. Dismissing him.

She gasped for air, realizing in that instant that she’d been holding her breath. He closed in on her, and now she could smell the blood on him, and under it, the scent of his sweat, the smell of smoke, and oddly, of cedar.

“What are you afraid of?” he demanded, his usually tempered accent thickening from some intensity of feeling.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she replied calmly, but she instantly knew it wasn’t true.

“I know you’re not afraid of me,” he continued, his eyes narrowing. “You’ve never been afraid of me.”

And then she realized it. And then, the instant her mind acknowledged the possibility that this fundamental truth, this thing between them, this trivial antagonizing little game that she had never once considered in good faith, could disappear into a second, darker possibility. Then, suddenly, the edge was under her feet.

He saw it. He seized her hair, shoved her roughly against the old stone altar, using his body to pin her between himself and the perfectly unyielding stone. She felt his hot breath against her ear.

“How do you want it?”

She looked to him, unsure of how to answer, waiting for her mind to click ahead, to calculate the new reality, to discard the old, but it was lagging. She looked up into his eyes, slate blue, normally so flat and expressionless, but at this distance she could see the delicate folds in his irises, and watched as his pupils dilated.

“Since when have you started asking?” she said acidly.

He laughed, a jagged little chuckle. “Are you afraid I’m going to rape you, Rakhila? After you’ve watched me pass up every opportunity for most of our lives?”

“You can try. You’ll lose my brother’s backing, and eventually your own soldiers will assassinate you when you can’t provision them. But you’ve thought of that.”

He leaned in, and she could feel him sniffing her skin, and then the faintest touch of his lips against her ear as he whispered in it.

“What are you thinking now, Rachel? Are you thinking about your sweetheart? Are you thinking about what you wanted to do with him? Are you sad that we killed him?”

“Stop,” she whispered, stung. But she could feel him, feel him breathing her in, feel his heart thumping through his broad frame. She could feel his hard contours through his sweater, and she observed, in a maudlin little corner of her mind, that it was very odd that in fifteen years she had never once seen him with his shirt off.

Then, that little animal detail flicked a switch, and her existential concerns were subsumed by biological concerns. She laid a shaking hand on his chest, and felt a tiny collapse inside of him as the desperation, the need, the churning, fermented lust that had been aging inside him since they were teenagers sloshed against his edges.

He looked at her. His eyes were wide, no longer able to hide his agony. He, being Sergei, had no natural ability to parse what little emotional capability he had, and that he would turn his knife on her if she did not cure him of it. She had seen into him. There was no coming back. He would never be able to look her in the eyes again, never be able to hold his head up in her presence. She would join her mentor, her would-be lover, and her body would be devoured by the vultures. And maybe she deserved that.

But it was simpler than that, because once entertained, the possibility had infected her. In the two seconds this calculation had taken her, Sergei did the heretofore unthinkable, bent down, and pressed his mouth hers. His kiss was soft, restrained, and he tasted vaguely of cloves. He pulled away, and looked at her as though waiting for her reaction. But it was there in his face. He knew her. He saw into her also, and she was totally exposed.

She seized his face and kissed him back, devouring him, fingers scraping through his platinum hair. He groaned into her mouth like he’d been punched. He caught her around the waist, bracing them both against the stone wall. After a moment, they both came up gasping.

He kissed her under her ear, moving down her neck, while she panted, staring up at the high ceiling through a haze of arousal. His fingers plucked apart the buttons of her shirt, and he filled his hand with one breast, squeezing gently at first, then hard enough to draw a cry from her. She did not tell him to stop. She felt a dark warmth in her belly when he twisted her nipple.

“Did you fuck him?” he whispered in her ear.

“Fuck who?” she was genuinely unsure of who she meant. On to the new reality.

He drew back and looked at her. “Have you been saving yourself for me, Rachel?”

She arched a brow at him, and divested herself of her shirt, giving him a full view of her breasts, one now slightly bruised. “Tell me, when was the last time you had a woman who wasn’t screaming or rented?”

He was temporarily distracted by the sight of her. He blinked, then played back her question in his head, and grinned.

“Sometimes they come willing. But none of them are you.”

She arched an eyebrow, planning to respond, but he pressed into her, kissed her fiercely, his thumb running along the underside of her jaw.

“You must know,” he whispered, suddenly tortured. “Rachel.”

“Don’t,” she begged. “It’s a bad joke, we both know it.”

“Bitch,” he hissed, and she felt pressure at her throat. “For years I let you do this to me.”

He stood away, and for an instant she felt a dropping sensation inside her. If he stopped touching her, she’d die. But instead he did something that completely stunned her. He dropped down to his hands and knees before her. His eyes were full of dark purpose as he unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans. He slipped his fingers under the hems and tugged slowly, pulling them down around her knees.

She watched him, hypnotized, as he brushed his knuckle over the front of her soaked panties. Then he pulled them aside, leaned forward, and kissed her engorged cunt, acting on what must have been a long held fantasy. He slid his tongue into her folds and drew it along her clit. Tears sprang to her eyes and she gasped. Before she knew it, she was grinding against his face, her fingers tangled up in his hair.

He purred against her, and she felt her knees go weak. When he slid two fingers inside of her, she groaned.

“You’re fucking tight, Rachel,” he informed her.

“So?” she wasn’t sure what she was saying.

“I love it,” he said, kissing her clit, sending a jolt through her. Then he stood back and looked at her. She caught herself on the smooth wall, and stepped out of the jeans. She now stood before him, almost naked except for the transparent bit of panties.

“Now you,” she commanded. “Take that off. Show me.”

He obeyed, deliberately languid as he slid the commando sweater over his head. He paused at this juncture, wanting to give her a full view of him before proceeding. Without the slimming effect of the black, he looked even more broad, and his torso was cut muscle. His chest hair, like his eyebrows, were a darker sandy blonde to the almost albino blonde on his head. He had a dancer’s total definition, his musculature coming from development beginning in his early teens, but his unaffected grace and beautiful pectoral, abdominal and oblique muscles were not purpose made for the aesthetic. He could snap a man’s neck as easily as opening a stiff jar, and liked that rather more than showing off for girls.

Rachel watched as he slowly undid the ties of his fatigues, and lowered them. He kicked off his boots, and then stood before her, naked as she was. His legs were as fine and developed as the rest of him. His erect cock was, to Rachel’s eye, large, bow shaped and extremely upwardly curved. The head of his cock was thicker than the base.

He smirked at her, enjoying her gaze, enjoying her objectification of him. He was a living, breathing disconnect, but he was well aware of his own beauty. He took his cock in his hand, and began to stroke it, slowly. Showing her, she realized, how he liked to be touched. And making himself harder for her.

She had a collection of toys that she used for her own pleasure, though they hadn’t come out of their box for a couple of years, as the desire had mostly been sapped by depression. None of them were as large as Sergei, and she felt, more than trepidation, a little excitement. She didn’t know what it would feel like, but it would hurt, and she was surprised at how much she wanted it. She wanted to give him that. She wanted to give him everything she’d denied him.

Almost everything. The intensity of his feeling disturbed her. It disturbed her that it was the only thing permitting her to consider the authenticity of his desire, but also that he felt it -- felt anything -- far more deeply than she did. It made her feel cornered and choked when she thought of him saying these words to her, baring his soul, fragmented and deformed as it was. But he was a simple monster. It wasn’t hard to distract him.

She put her hands on his chest, inhaled his scent as she explored his sculpted body. He breathed in lightly each time she traced the delineation of each contour and knurl, determined as she was to exhaust her extensive knowledge of human physiography. She knew the name and mechanical function of every single part of him, and she knew where the nerve clusters were densest. Meanwhile, he continued to stroke himself unhurriedly, taking his time, soaking in her touch and savouring her evident pleasure in his physique.

“When?” She murmured. She didn’t need to be specific.

“When you were fourteen. That’s when I realized,” he replied, closing his eyes as he remembered, as he enjoyed the sensual inventory of her hands. “You came back from Oxford, and you were so lovely. And so lonely, but too stubborn to admit it, so you became hard instead. That’s where I first saw it in you.”

“Saw what?”

“I don’t know how to describe it,” he admitted. “Your curiosity. Your fearlessness. Your potential for violence.”

She moved her hands lower, fingers finding the top of his hips, the lower abs around his navel. “You thought about raping me.”

“Constantly,” he said, unashamedly. “I take what I want. But I wanted your pleasure. I wanted you, whatever lives behind your eyes, in your skin. I wanted to feed on your spirit. Taking you by force, even if I’d made you come, made you like it...and I can...it’s not the same thing.”

She reached down and put her hand around his cock. “That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

He tensed in his core, and relinquished himself to her, tilting his head back as she moved her palm and fingers over the velvety skin that covered his shaft. She couldn’t quite get her fingers around the fat end, but she was doing something right because he let out a groan.

“Rachel,” he sighed. He ached for her, that was plain enough. She kissed him, pulsed her tongue into his mouth. It was finally too much for him. He shoved her against the wall, hard enough to knock the breath out of her. He lifted her easily, fingers digging into her thighs, helped as she clung to his neck. She looked down, wanting to watch him do it, wanting to see his cock sliding into her.

She was tight, as he had observed, and the head of his cock was so thick. She felt a pinching, pulling sensation as he forced himself into her. It was clear that he liked that this hurt her, finding the tang of violation was sweet on his tongue. She whimpered as he pushed himself slowly into her, maximizing her discomfort, making sure she felt every inch of him.

“Take it, whore,” he whispered, and there was a sickly, toxic love in his voice. “All this time, you reject me, now you want this, so take it for me.”

“Sergei,” she whimpered, feeling her mind, her persistent, never silent mind, slipping away, receding before something deeper, more simplistic and animal, more childlike.

“God, Rakhila,” he whispered, falling into Russian. “Do you know how you feel.”

“Give to me,” she murmured in the same language. “I want to take all of you.”

He was clearly surprised, but quickly delighted by the devolution in her normally arch, guarded demeanour. She never thought of herself as the type to surrender control, but she found, as his cock opened her, shoved up painfully against his cervix and made her feel as though her whole lower half was filled with heavy lead, that she wanted to submit to him. She could feel her own wetness smearing her thighs as her body worked to lubricate his passage into her.

He began to thrust inside of her, slowly at first. He kissed her, letting his tongue mirror the action of his cock as it tugged inside of her. She moaned into his mouth.

“I love you,” he breathed, increasing his pace. “Now show me how sorry you are that you made me wait so long.”

She was in no state to counter his words, so she obeyed, arching her hips, moving in rhythm with him to maximize his penetration. The pain evolved into something smoother, something completely unlike anything she’d ever felt. She had lived twenty five years more or less indifferent to sex, but this heavy, bruising pleasure was unlike anything she’d ever given herself.

It felt incredible, his cock sliding inside her, the head catching her g-spot, then impacting her cervix as his thrusts grew harder. She looked down into his face, those dark blue eyes, that hungry expression that she had seen when he’d first pulled her to his feet. And she found herself wishing she had given herself sooner, for the peace that this brought to her eternal distraction.

She was close to coming. He knew it, and picked up his pace even more, slamming his cock into her, rubbing her raw, making her cunt gush as the orgasm took her. She twitched on his cock as fluid dripped down the insides of her thighs, as it soaked his balls. He arched from the small of his back as he cried out, and she knew he was pumping come inside of her, that he wanted it this way, their mutual ecstasy, to force her to go to that place of ultimate vulnerability with him. He gasped against her cheek, almost a sob, twitching as he emptied into her. She felt tears of exertion against her skin, or maybe it was the emotional outpouring of years of frustration.

He bit into the thick muscle that connected her neck and shoulder, making her scream. He cradled her head as he did it, leaving a mark so deep that she could see it in her mind, the dents filled with bruise blood underneath the surface. Then he kissed it, tongued it, making sure she felt it, understood that he had marked her. He pulled his cock out of her, then shoved three fingers into her, using his own come as a lubricant. She writhed as he forced her to come again, then again until she became unbearably sensitive and she had to shove him away with a mewling gasp.

She sat back against the smooth stone altar, and watched him under hooded eyelids, panting as she tried to catch her breath, her belly and thighs aching from being roughly used. She looked at Sergei, who still knelt before her, sweat shining on his skin, making his hair stick to his forehead. He looked back at her, those lapis eyes now cold, even inscrutable. He wasn’t one for hiding his thoughts, and it confused her.

“Do you really love me?” she asked, the words falling unbidden from her mouth. He didn’t answer right away, but rose, went over and sat down beside her. She watched him, watched the way his muscles moved under his skin. It was mesmerizing, and she wondered at her own fallibility, in the face of this cheap evolutionary trick.

“Yes,” he said flatly, his tone icy. “I don’t know what it is, or what it means. I want to be near you. It’s painful. That’s as much as I understand.”

She turned to him, and she felt regret sour in her throat. Not for what they’d done, but for the chasm the yawned between them, the knowledge that he’d drag her down into it if she wasn’t careful.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said quietly.

She could feel him tense beside her, could feel anger warming through him.

“Because you think you’re too good for me,” he said acidly. “Rachel, the princess. Maybe you’d rather be with your American spy. I could do it. You know it.”

“Will you feed my body to the vultures?” she wondered, then leaned against him, letting her head tilt on to his shoulder.

She felt his two fundamental instincts battling inside him. His normal approach to anything that did not suit his mood was to destroy it utterly. He had to reckon with her now. He wanted to fuck her again, to have her in his arms, to act out his fantasies. And she knew that the status quo between them was shattered. He’d killed Hudson to isolate her as much as anything. To trap her in her own loneliness and disappointment, not even really anticipating himself as her inevitable consolation. Or had he?

“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted. “I don’t feel for you. At best you annoy me. At worse, you’re suicide.”

He smiled, evidently pleased by that assessment. Then he picked himself off the ground, and offered his hand to her. She took it, and he lifted her easily to her feet. Then pulled her into his arms, kissed her, stroked her hair. She allowed him to do this, but her shock and despair were returning to her, and they sapped her energy.

She walked around him, around the altar, and looked down at the slumping corpse of Hudson Ford. He’d needled her about her lack of empathy. She could not wish for him to be alive again because the impossibility of it was so grounded in her merciless sense of logic. If she let herself, she would collapse at her centre like a black hole, and her self control and her presence of mind would be sucked into grief. But not for this thing. For the life that might have been.

She felt Sergei’s hand on the back of her neck, thumb stroking up her spine, a possessive gesture, and a threatening reminder. She felt a shiver run through her, felt the living, breathing presence as it pressed against her back, and was suddenly aware that his come was dripping down along the inside of her thigh. He was the only other living organic thing in this ancient place. Even his cold fire was still warmer than the ashes. 


	2. Chapter 2

Their mother’s funeral was attended by the entire village. Words were said. Rachel stood with her family, the remains of it, until the vultures began to descend over the slope. Vikram stood at her shoulder. His head ached with grief, and pain. He thought about Sergei’s offer, to interrogate the man who had failed to prevent this outcome, but Vikram knew it was his own mistake, his own crime. He watched the vultures flock to the place where his mother’s body now lay, prepared for their feast. 

His sister turned away, walking now with their father. He wanted to go to her, to admit what he’d done, to tell her it was his doing, this awful sacrifice. Eventually he’d be forced to. Having Sergei kill Hudson had been rash. The American had wanted Rachel, and that was enough to make Vikram see red. There was a mark just visible under her hair, and even now it irked him that this man had ever considered himself worthy to show his presumption. Now he, Vikram, had declared war when he might have demanded concessions. Sergei was no doubt pleased by the prospect, but Vikram was apprehensive. 

As he followed the descending crowd away from the sky burial, he noticed Sergei looming a few feet away, appropriate in his traditional black commando sweater and fatigues. At first Vikram thought his associate was coming to see him, but it was Rachel he wanted to speak to. Vikram frowned. Normally he allowed the two of them to snipe at each other, only intervening when Rachel became too nettled to think clearly. But he had no interest in seeing Sergei antagonize his sister at this moment. He moved forward, then hesitated.

There was something strange about Rachel’s attitude. She turned away from him, as usual, but not in anger. She looked wistful. She did not object as he walked at her shoulder. No rising hackles, no hardening of her jaw and shoulders. Vikram wondered if grief had sapped her will to abuse him. 

He said something to their father, who gave him a sad smile and nodded in acknowledgement, then he remained in place, waiting for the crowd to drift around him until Vikram came to him.

“What was that?” he asked, annoyed.

“Offering my condolences,” Sergei said, arching a brow. “Obviously.”

 

“With Rachel.”

 

Sergei shrugged, noncommittal. “The same.”

Vikram looked at him. “And she let you go unscathed, after what you did to her lover.”

Sergei stopped, and looked at him, smiling thinly. “She’s tired, Vikram. She’s defeated. Broken.”

“What a stupid lie,” Vikram scoffed. ”Even for you.” 

Sergei only grinned. 

It wasn’t until later, until after a joyless meal, that Vikram repaired to the veranda, that he realized what he had failed to understand, when voices drifted up from below. Sound carried in this part of the Crown, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. Rachel’s voice. Sergei’s voice. Talking together in a confidential tone. 

He was seized by the need to understand what the hell was going on with them, and he went down to the outer wall. 

Rachel stood, her back against the black stone wall as Sergei rose over her. She wasn’t shrinking or afraid, just leaning on the wall for support. Vikram remained in the shadow as he walked forward, observing the way Sergei’s head bent to her, making eye contact instead of looking down his curved nose at her, the way he usually did. 

“Stop trying to convince me,” she hissed. “You know it won’t work.”

“I’m not trying to convince you,” he said, lip curling. “I’m telling you what to believe in order for you to remain safe.”

“And what is that?” Vikram asked quietly, making his presence known. Rachel looked at him wide eyed, as though surprised in the act of doing something forbidden. He himself was tense with the fear that she’d guessed about his involvement, but Sergei’s words indicated he had not revealed that information.

Rachel recovered herself, straightened, adopted her old arch demeanour. “This idiot has started a war we can’t hope to win.”

Vikram took a deep breath. “You don’t seem upset about your American.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you think I’m that weak?”

He looked at her, evaluating her. “Are you?”

She pursed her lips. “I know you did it, Vikram. I know you’re covering because you’ve lost control of the project, because you’re responsible for mother’s death. If that isn’t bad enough, the sheer inelegance of the scheme is so uncharacteristically stupid, it’s no wonder that things have gone so wrong.”

He felt the blood drain from his face. “It was out of my hands.” 

She looked at him. “You should have told me. I don’t know what you expected when you asked Sergei to helm your genocide. It’s not like conspiracy is in his wheelhouse.”

And then Vikram saw Sergei, watched him as he cleaned his nails with the same absurdly large knife he’d used to gut the American, watched him watch Rachel, dark blue eyes resting on her not with covetousness, but with something that surprised and frightened Vikram even more. Confidence. 

He reached up and pushed Rachel’s head aside, showing a purple and yellow mark, indentations of teeth clearly visible. She slapped his hand away and backed up a step.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. 

He looked around her at Sergei, who didn’t seem interested in him. Keen to the scent of Rachel’s pain, he perked up, his body gracefully straightening. 

“I thought that was Ford’s work,” Vikram said, his voice shaking. “That would be forgivable, even understandable.”

Rachel’s face turned red, and Vikram knew the sudden fear that she would turn her formidable rage on him. She’d never done so, not once, and he wasn’t sure if his heart could stand to ache more than it did. If this broke between them, he wouldn’t know what to do. 

Oddly, it was Sergei who came to his rescue. He came up from behind Rachel and slid his arm around her collar bone, pressing his face into her hair as he watched Vikram, eyes mocking, cruel. Enjoying the effect he was having. Fifteen years he’d watched Sergei Vetrov covet his sister. She had rejected him in every possible way. When they were thirteen and fifteen, he’d taken a playful grab at a budding breast, and she’d kicked him in the mouth. 

Rachel let out a breath, and leaned back against Sergei’s chest, soaking up the feel of him at her back. Never in a thousand years did Vikram countenance the idea that she would submit to his endless, acidic flirtation, and now she was wearing him like a fur coat. No. Like armour. 

After a moment she did lean away from him, as though she’d meant to do it earlier. He stood back, crossed his arms, satisfied for now.

She looked now at Vikram with cool, calculating eyes. 

“You shouldn’t have left me out,” she said accusingly. “You should have taken me into your confidence. You should have trusted me.”

His eyes flicked to Sergei, then back to her. “I think I’m right in questioning your judgement.” 

“Are you afraid,” she whispered, a wicked grin lighting her features. “That I’ll steal him from you?”

She turned her back on him before he could quite fully grasp the ramification of her words, slipped her arm around Sergei’s neck, and kissed him full on the mouth. He himself was momentarily surprised, but then he pulled her close, tangled a hand in her black hair and kissed her back, deeply, totally disregarding Vikram’s presence. 

As he watched this thing he’d never conceived of, he wondered what else he didn’t know. He wondered what parts of Rachel had remained hidden from him, or if the killing of Hudson had revealed something to her. To turn to Sergei was to throw herself into a void. And yet he looked at her with some emotion that could nearly be mistaken for genuine. 

Rachel nestled herself against him, fingers clutching at the knit rows of his black sweater. Sergei looked at him, his mocking demeanour dropped for an animal curiosity Vikram did not like.

“I lied to her for you,” he said flatly, his mouth hardening. “That isn’t what I’m for.”

“Well,” Vikram said harshly. “You’ll get to use your real talents soon, I have no doubt. I hope you have enough ordnance.”

Rachel pushed herself back from Sergei’s chest, then took his hand, looking at her brother. “We’ll discuss it in the morning.” 

Vikram looked on, hurt and confused, as his sister walked away with his most dangerous ally. To think they had been enemies for fifteen years. He hoped for Rachel’s sake that she didn’t let her guard down. 

\--

Sergei walked beside Rachel, simultaneously admiring her lithe frame, and wondering at what point she had become a joint chief in their little operation. He’d given it the title Operation Baptist, and Vikram had called it insipid, but he nonetheless adopted it. He hadn’t picked up on the real theme, that Sergei thought of him as a monkish amateur, that the entire idea of killing a host of people quietly was a criminal misuse of his finely honed skills. 

The walk to the Crown barracks was short. It wasn’t his usual haunt, but the commander quarters were kept in good order whenever he had occasion to stay. The men who garrisoned here were, according to his standing as Mikhail Vetrov’s son and heir, nominally under his command. But they were soft, accustomed to the easy life the Crown provided, and they had no love for him. Anyone, he reflected, who had loved his father generally found him to be a disappointment.

Most of the crew was abed, except for the watch, when they arrived. They looked curiously at Rachel as she made her way into the barracks, a modern facility built on large exaggerated A frames like the school, and various other buildings designed by Radhesh. His quarters were at the far end of one angle, and the roof came down at one wall, giving it an almost tent-like quality.

It was, however, a generous space, and the sparse furniture - a bed, a desk, a dresser, a glassed in shower, seemed even more isolated in the centre. A window was cut into the angled wall, and cast yellowed moonlight on to the floor. 

It illuminated Rachel’s dark skin as she wandered through it, and for an instant she glowed golden. He lingered at the doorway, attention drawn by her beauty, her full lips, her cafe au lait complexion. Her dark eyes with the honey highlights, almost impossible to see except when she looked directly at him. She was a perfect blend of the Russian and Indian, with the straight nose and high cheekbones inherited from her so recently departed mother, and the dark even brows and glossy black hair so dominant in South Asia. Or, as it had once been, when such a place had existed.

She wandered into the middle of the room, lonely in its emptiness, and touched the corner of his bed. It was a queen sized bed, made with crisp perfection. It was one of the menial tasks drilled into him at his military boarding school, and he found he had a Pavlovian need to keep his quarters tidy. 

Rachel picked up on this. She smiled wickedly at him as she reached down, dragged her nails through the coverlet and undid a corner, twisting it out of shape.

“Whore,” he said, amiably enough.

She perched on the corner of the bed and slipped her shoes off her feet, one at a time. Her eyes took in the rest of the details, no doubt filing them away in that interminable memory of hers. And would she remember him, watching her with unrepentant desire, appreciating her loveliness in full sight of her instead of behind her back.

“Vikram is afraid for you,” he remarked, lifting himself from his observation post and striding over to her. “I wonder why that is.”

“I’m sure you do,” she mocked. “I can only wonder many times he stood by while you inflicted unspeakable violence on some innocent victim.”

“Yes,” he said mildly. “But does he think I will do that to you?”

“Will you?” She was not apprehensive, merely interested.

“What is that word,” he murmured, walking over to the desk and shedding his watch, his knives and his Desert Eagle. “Pathology.”

Rachel nodded, pursed her lips. “I’m an exception to your pathology. For whatever reason, I suppose you call it love, I don’t fit.”

“It is love,” he insisted, bristling slightly.

“Familiarity,” she countered. “My presence has been a sustained definite in your life for so long that you can’t imagine it without me. Other women are incidental encounters, short acquaintances. It’s convenient to murder them when you inevitably grow bored or annoyed with them.”

“It’s also fun,” he purred. “You should try it sometime.”

She rolled her eyes and leaned back on her hands. “Sounds like a laugh.”

“You say that,” he said. “But I think you’re afraid you’ll like the sport. I can show you what you’re missing, Rachel. That little part of you that’s always been missing.”

She stared at him with those big doe eyes, reproachful, uncertain. He drew his bowie knife, eight inches long, broad, honed to perfection, and walked over to her. She drew back in sudden fear, and he felt a bittersweet pleasure. Then he felt a violent rejection of the idea of hurting her, using her like he used others. It was totally unfamiliar anathema. 

He turned the knife and offered the handle to her. Puzzled, she took it. Then he reached behind his head and pulled his sweater over his head and tossed it on the dresser. He went down on his knees before her, and licked his lips.

“Cut me,” he breathed. 

She stared at him. “What?”

“Cut me,” he repeated. 

“No,” she said, affronted.

He showed his teeth. “Cut me, you fucking bitch, or I’ll break your neck and fuck you while you’re still warm.”

The knife flashed and he saw a streak of white, then grunted in pain as he drew back. He raised a hand to his face, surprised. He had expected her to go for the chest, or the shoulder. He looked at the blood on his hand, then the blood on his knife -- there was very little, as it was so sharp.

She looked at him, and he could feel her, her fear slipping away as her clinical mind took over, eyes travelling over the cut, from chin to cheekbone. His mouth stung where the blade had passed over his lips, but the cut hadn’t penetrated to the inside of his mouth. 

She laid the flat of it against his throat, and looked down at him. “Was that meant to illustrate some particular lesson?”

“You like it,” he said, feeling the cut stretch as he smiled. It was going to be a nasty scar, in spite of its neatness. “It makes you wet, the way it makes me hard. You just don’t know it yet.”

“And you think you have something to teach me,” she murmured, letting the cool metal slide over his carotid artery. 

He snatched the knife back with lightning quickness, taking it out of her hand before she even realized he’d moved. In the same motion, he shoved her back on the bed, straddled her and pressed the knife to her throat. He expected her eyes to fill with tears, for her to struggle, to do all of the things they always did when he played with them like this. But she only glared at him, annoyed by his antics, uninterested in his threat.

He tossed the knife away and bent over her. “You see?”

She blinked when a drop of his blood fell on her cheek, and rolled like a red tear. She touched it, brought her finger to her mouth, licked it. Then she arched up and licked the slash she’d made, tongue travelling over his chin, over his mouth, up the left side of his nose, and over his cheekbone, where it terminated just shy of his left eye. 

He shuddered, every fibre of him. The hair rose on his arms and the back of his neck. His cock pressed painfully against the front of his fatigues, and the gentle hand that cupped the other side of his face might as well have been made of ice.

“Is that what you want?” she whispered in his ear. “You want me to be like you? Because I’m not, Sergei. I’m a scientist. A surgeon. I prefer delicate operations to crude hatchet work. So tell me, what do you have to offer me?”

Suddenly he had lost interest in the philosophical question. His face burned, inflamed, distracting him. Even more distracting was the sudden hands undoing his fatigues, pulling them down around his ass. She wrapped her small dark hand around his cock and worked it, making him groan, making him go weak in the small of his back. A bead of pre come dripped down, and she leaned up to catch it with her tongue.

He knew he was done. She kissed the head of his cock, lubricated it with her tongue, then began to suckle it. He tilted his head back and whimpered, disbelieving that this was really happening, that his darling, hateful little Rachel was sucking him, was drawing his cock further into her mouth, into her throat. It was something almost beyond his imagining, because he had imagined raping her nearly every day, imagined forcing his cock into her cunt-- or in her ass on the really bad days-- but this thing she was doing to him now required her volition, and so it was difficult for him to imagine. 

He gripped her hair, tightening his fingers in its softness. She moaned on his cock, cupped his balls, did something incredible with her gag reflex that allowed her to take all of him, to press her nose into his pubic hair. 

“Christ, Rachel,” he gasped. “Where did you fucking learn that.”

She couldn’t answer, of course. He looked down at her and those eyes stared up at him, communicating a reminder that she had all the power here and he had none, and in that instant he began to spew, to pump come into her throat. He cried out, and then again in a more strangled voice as she withdrew so the head rested on her tongue, and gently sucked the orgasm out of him. 

He fell back against the headboard and watched her through tear blurred eyes. She smiled at him, not a kind smile, but a triumphant one, then rose and stood over him.

“What do you think you have to teach me?” she repeated, hands on her hips. He only stared, struck mute, weighted under the leaden afterglow. She shed her clothes, turned and walked to the transparent shower stall in the corner, and began to wash. 

He watched her for a few minutes, his body in a state of what felt like fatal relaxation. He felt drugged, anesthetized. He wanted to watch her, to see the water sluice off her brown skin, but then he let it take him, let it drag him down into sleep.

\--

Rachel, now clean, contemplated her vicious new lover and wondered at herself. This was a dangerous game, and she hadn’t realized how bored she’d been until she’d started playing it. Naked, she stood before him, letting the air dry her skin. He dozed, equally naked, though there was no element of deceptive calm. 

She gazed down at his body, feeling subdued pleasure in looking at him. His physique reminded her of the Barberini Faun, though his posture was less exaggerated, and his cock not nearly so shy. Moving closer, she let her eyes travel up his sculpted legs, over his nest of sand blonde pubic hair, up the rippling abs, and over his broad, hard chest. His neck was graceful, and the expression on his face was softened by his repose, his lips parted, making his mouth look even more sensual.

The shock of white blonde hair that tumbled down over his forehead made him look almost angelic. But no one who had seen him awake would ever make that mistake. She herself was slightly unsettled by this situation, and wondered if anyone else had ever stood over him while he slept in this fashion. She doubted it.

The red line that now bisected the left half of his face had clotted, but it was still angry and inflamed, and open where it was closer to his mouth. She went over to the dresser, and rummaged through it, finding it nearly empty except for an old first aid kit in the bottom drawer. She didn’t know how she’d known it would be there, only that she did.

She took out some butterfly bandages, peroxide and cotton balls, then went and kneeled by his head. She looked down into his face again, and examined the cut. Was this his idea of love, she wondered. Letting her close enough to mark him this way. Allowing her to live afterwards. He hadn’t expected her to go for his face when he’d invited her to play chicken with that monstrous bowie knife. Would he learn, she wondered, and doubted it. 

His eyes opened and his hand shot out, catching her by the throat, sending a bolt of alarm through her. The look in his eyes was feral, completely void of humanity. She grasped at his wrist, knowing full well he could dislodge her vertebra this way, fracture the hyoid bone or crush her windpipe. Seeing that it was her, his grip loosened, and his expression resolved itself into nonchalance. 

“Don’t do that,” he told her, looking amused now. She touched her throat, winced, knew that his purple finger marks would appear there before long. Then, fully annoyed now, she filled a cotton ball with peroxide, then held it over the most open part of his wound, right in the corner of his mouth, and squeezed it. 

He jerked his head away and hissed as the chemical reacted with his exposed flesh. “Bitch!”

“Don’t be such a baby,” she mocked. “If you get an infection, I’ll have to amputate.”

He turned back to look at her, eyes narrowed. “You’d like that.”

“Like you aren’t vain,” she murmured.

“Is that why you cut my face?”

“I could have cut your throat.”

That gave him pause, and he accepted it. He leaned back and allowed her to swab the wound, then watched her as she used butterfly bandages to tape shut the worst of it. Whenever the maxiline muscles of his face flexed, the edges of it strained and showed the red exposed flesh underneath, but Rachel supposed there was no helping that.

“It’s going to scar,” she told him.

He levelled an intense gaze at her. She’d never really spent time memorizing his face the way she had others, but she noticed now how quickly it could move from expressive mobility to a kind of slack, wide eyed stare that reminded her of serial killer mugshots she’d seen in forensic psychology classes. It also reminded her of the glass eyed stare of a taxidermied animal, an illusion that had never worked on her, even as a child. Sergei, his essence, his personality, for lack of a better word, his soul, was as light and hollow one of those styrofoam forms.

But there was something there. Something animated him. Some thin margin of humanity that allowed him to feel rage, joy, lust. Not mourning, or compassion or sympathy, not the higher emotions. But the evolutionary development was there. Psychopathy, Rachel reflected, was an evolutionary innovation. Maybe that was the source of his attraction. He saw in her the ability to adopt the strategy. That neither of them intended to procreate (indeed, conditional to Sergei’s delinquent punishment for putting his school mate in coma was forced sterilization) didn’t figure into the drive. 

He smiled, hideously stretching the cut as he did so. 

“You don’t like the uncertainty,” he said. “You’re looking for an explanation, a system. There isn’t one. There’s only this.”

Before she could respond, he slid a hand into her hair, gripped it, and pulled her in for a kiss. She felt the tacky clotted wound against her cheek, the edges of the cut that ran through his lip. His tongue was long, warm and insistent in its penetration of her mouth. She yielded to it, and then she wanted his cock. 

She straddled him, balancing her hands on his hard belly, thumbs resting in the contours of his muscles. He watched her with that deadly stare, vigilant and predatory. Then his eyelids fluttered as she drew her wet cunt along his shaft, feeling it harden as it filled with his blood. She lifted it, directed the head into her opening, and sank down on to it. It was difficult, taking him like this, but she had control. He lay a hand on her hip, another over her mound, pressing with the heel of his hand. 

“Make me come,” he told her. “You think you’re better than me but all you really want is to give me what you owe me.”

She knew he meant after denying him for all those years. A tiny part of her wanted to rebel, to strike him across his face, to open the wound she’d just closed, but she gave herself over to the peace of being used. Seeing that cut on his face, seeing him wear it next to his intoxicated adoration, it made he feel oddly safe. Even cherished. 

She leaned back and reached behind her, feeling her core muscles burn. He held her around the small of her back as she reached back and cupped her small hand around his prodigious balls, stroking them, feeling the softness of his fine pubic hair as she took his cock into her, using her kegels to coax him. 

“Whore. Slut. Cunt,” he whimpered, then his abs crunched as he as he came, pressing his face against her breasts, moaning. He sucked one nipple, causing the corner of his mouth to bleed on to her as his come filled her. She imagined it, splashing into her, making its way up into her womb, seeping into the flesh, infecting, leaking into her internal organs. She pictured her lungs, her heart filling with his come as she came herself, came wet, totally unassisted except for his cock inside her. He was perfectly shaped, she realized, to make her gush like this. That also seemed natural to her, since he so enjoyed the texture of warm human fluid, even if he preferred to extract it using edged weapons instead of this penetrating organ.

He moved to the other breast and suckled it, tensing in the middle of the last of his orgasm fed itself into her. She held his head, stroking his hair as she did so, and imagined that the breast he sucked on, heavy and full, was designed for for this, nursing his arousal, getting him hard, giving him pleasure.

She lay down next to him, dozed as he sucked on her, then finally fell into sleep. When she woke, he was gone, and except for the faint smell of cedar, gunsmoke and sweat in the sheets next to her, there was no trace of him.


End file.
